1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing apparatus, a method of controlling the same, and a storage medium, and more particularly to a printing apparatus control technique for managing paper assignment in a printing system.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a printing market, which is called the print-on-demand (POD) market or the production market, a form of business is adopted in which printing is performed according to an order placed by a customer and then a printout is reliably delivered to the customer on or before delivery date. In a job site in the printing market, it is very important to perform large-amount printing speedily. For this reason, in general, an operator who performs various operations on a printing apparatus as a specialist is placed in the job site. The operator as a specialist performs paper replenishment/replacement/assignment, print job management, job ticket editing, post processing including conveyance and cutting/bookbinding of a printout, and finishing. The term “paper assignment” mentioned here refers to an operation performed by the operator so as to assign replenished or replaced papers to paper feeders of the printing apparatus.
The printing apparatus determines what type of papers are contained in which paper feeder, based on paper information on papers assigned to the paper feeders. Paper replenishment/replacement/assignment is a most important task among operator operations. This is because when paper replenishment/replacement/assignment is not properly performed, the printing apparatus is brought into a state where required papers have run out, during execution of a print job. In this case, the printing apparatus has to temporarily stop its print engine to suspend a printing process. When the printing process is suspended, printing cannot be restarted until replenishment/replacement/assignment of required papers is completed. Further, reheating of the print engine and the like processing are executed after restart of the printing, and hence it takes long before the printing is enabled again (this event will be hereinafter referred to as “time loss”). An operator has to complete paper replenishment/replacement/assignment before start of printing according to a print job to be executed, so as to prevent occurrence of the time loss.
On the other hand, in recent years, the needs of customers have diversified, and in accordance with this diversification, the types of papers available for printing have also diversified. For this reason, in assignment of papers to a paper feeder, the operator needs to select a type of papers for assignment from many paper types, and therefore an operation error is more likely to occur. To cope with this situation, there has been proposed a method in which candidate types of papers for assignment are narrowed down according to a print job to be executed (see e.g. Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 2004-330781). In this method, only papers (paper types) that can be used by a print job to be executed are displayed as candidates for paper assignment, which makes it possible to reduce a possibility that an operator will make an error in paper assignment.
As described above, the operator checks what type of papers are to be supplied to which paper feeder for paper replenishment or replacement, according to a print job to be executed, and then paper assignment is performed based on the result of the check. For this reason, even in the case of performing reprinting, the operator has to check what type of papers are to be supplied to which paper feeder for paper replenishment or replacement, and then carries out paper assignment again. This operator operation requires time and labor. Further, there is a fear that an operation error occurs during execution of paper reassignment by the operator.